Aurora Ramazzotti reveals bulimia battle on Ballando con le Stelle

The confession before her performance

Aurora Ramazzotti, a contestant on Ballando con le Stelle, spoke publicly about her eating disorder in the seventh episode of the Rai1 dance show, broadcast on Saturday, 14 November. The segment was a clip shown before her performance and was built around her weekly training sessions with her instructor, Nikita Perotti. The rehearsal room setting, with the trust she had built there, gave her the space to speak about a part of her life she had never discussed on television. Ramazzotti is 29 and said she had suffered from bulimia through her adolescence. Milly Carlucci hosts the programme.

She explained that the disorder had become her way of coping with a pain she felt she could not express, and she framed it as the answer she had found to her own unhappiness.

“The solution for me was to vomit, I just wanted to be thin.”

Years of comparison with her mother

Ramazzotti said that from childhood she was measured against her mother, Michelle Hunziker, whom she described as a wonderful, famous and much-loved woman. She recalled classmates calling her ugly, saying she was too tall and did not have a slim enough body, and mocking her for her almond-shaped eyes. She said that being the tallest girl in her class, at a time when that was not seen as attractive, added to the pressure. Her sense of the damage was that she had turned against herself in order to keep loving her mother.

“To love my mother, I stopped loving myself.”

She said few people can understand how the mechanism worked, and she stressed that the feeling of being less came from others pointing it out to her.

“Nobody can imagine what it means to have a mother who is so beautiful, so famous and so loved, and to feel constantly less.”

The disorder and its toll

She said she had hated herself for many years and had physically hurt herself, and that the disorder took hold of her routine from the early morning onward. She described losing her voice and beginning to lose her hair, and said she felt trapped in a cage with no way out. She said the relief the disorder gave her in the moment mattered more to her than the awareness that it was harming her. She also said she was a slave to this pattern and felt it had shaped her days for a long time.

Guilt, therapy and a message to others

Ramazzotti said she felt guilty, believing she had no right to such pain because she had grown up in a fortunate family that had given her everything. She first sought psychological help at seven, when her parents, Michelle Hunziker and Eros Ramazzotti, separated, and she has spoken before about how therapy helped her through difficult periods. She said she is doing much better as a result of therapy. Her message to people in a similar situation was that at some point they need to work through the pain and talk to someone, because there is always someone who can help if they reach out.